Tell HN: The Amount of Irrelevant Content on Here Is Insane
After following the advice of a long term HNer who I trust, I created my own HN filter to auto-hide all posts with high negative sentiment polarity or non-technical relevance (I like HN but I don't need some rando telling me about how my day job works), and it's finally gotten back to the pre-2022 experience.
The crazy thing is the amount of material being hidden - I'm seeing almost 200-300 submissions being blocked a day, and it is these submissions that appear to be driving the bulk of conversation on HN now.
12 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 98.5 ms ] threadYou might just be witnessing the backlash to YC's increased investment in defense and surveillance companies. In general, the startup pendulum is shifting away from the populist B2C status quo we used to have during the SaaS days.
Have a good cry and then complain some more.
Here's a past approach that proved successful for some time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013
This would be useful. As of right now it looks like HN is leaving that sort of analysis up to its users. Which is fine. But if this is going to be the case then a coordinated effort is necessary to help spring the mods to action.
1. is this topic "technical" (ie. Directly related to the day job of a software engineer, electrical engineer, computer engineer, computer science). If so allow.
2. Does this topic give advice on how to drive GTM? If so allow.
Everything else I'm hard hiding so it is somewhat lossy, but I don't need to read discourse about zeitgeist about "VC" or politics from random HNers who don't know what a vintage is or what an LA does.
I could go more precise with my rules and filtering, but it's good enough for me.
I haven't thought of a solution for account filtering yet though and some accounts (a couple of whom are on this thread as well) are deeply aggravating.
The difference today is that the hottest technology has also become a hot button culture war item that has for the first time split the tech community in half. This in turn creates comment sections that turn into ideological flame wars.
You could find a ask hn for ever year since inception pontificating about how the site has changed and yearning for the old hackernews.
I've been running analytics on HN recently. It's all getting prepped into a bigger blog post, but for now this is just my observations.
HN is:
* More hostile every year, with a huge inflection point after COVID
* Talking less about STEM (and moderately less about business/finance) and more about politics every year, with the biggest inflection change around COVID
* Decreasing the number of sentences and words in each post year on year.
* An increasing amount of positive or negative sentiment comments with a sharp rise in 2024
* Always a higher number of negative comments than positive comments, with a sharp rise in negative comments in 2024
The trajectory of HN does not look good. Today's HN is getting more hostile, more negative, more political, and has shorter more off-the-cuff comments than it used to.
But in all honesty I don't think there's any way to fix this without fundamentally changing the site. It's no coincidence that so much of the site changed over COVID. In my experience, anonymous and pseudonymous online communities all became much more hostile from COVID onward. Those are just the people that hang out online these days. Any change to counteract this would probably involve fundamentally changing HN's rules, ranking, and sorting. My guess is the mods have largely "given up" on this and treat HN as a sort of maintenance node community, in a sort of late stage management role.
1. Things have always been this way.
2. Read the guidelines. They have always been this way.
3. Follow the guidelines. You are off-topic.
4. Email us at hn@ycombi etc.
I mean, I guess we all just pick up our ball and go to lobsters? The site has turned to dregs and every time we call it out we are warned. So of what use is it than to mindlessly ramble with burner accounts and nothing to lose? The old “even Reddit is better” holds true. Oh no, I guess I broke the guidelines by comparing to Reddit.
Try fucking moderating the site once in awhile, ffs.